When comparing LXTerminal vs cool-retro-term, the Slant community recommends LXTerminal for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” LXTerminal is ranked 15th while cool-retro-term is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose LXTerminal is:
LXTerm is the official terminal for the LXDE desktop environment, which is a very light DE in itself. So LXTerminal is a very good choice for lower-end systems.
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Pros
Pro Lightweight
LXTerm is the official terminal for the LXDE desktop environment, which is a very light DE in itself. So LXTerminal is a very good choice for lower-end systems.
Pro Multiple tabs support
LXTerminal supports working with multiple tabs and tab-based navigation.
Pro Built-in transparency
Pro Customizable keyboard shortcuts
Pro Lighhtweight and ticks most boxes.
Pro Customize-able background/foreground colors
Pro Mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens
Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.
Pro Good rendering
If you disable every special effect and the framing, the rendering is actually quite comfortable and readable making a good terminal option if you have CPU cycles to spare.
Pro Good fun
For simple tasks this is wonderful - anyone seeing it will love it, takes me back to using the Commodore Pet in college in the early 80's.
Pro Available in multiple repositories
This terminal is available for download from repositories in all the most popular distros, making it easily available.
Cons
Con Not very customizable
LXTerminal, like XTerminal and UXTerminal, is not very customizable and extendable (at least not as much as other terminal emulators).
Con Not very practical by today's standards
While it certainly has an aesthetic feel, cool-retro-term is nothing more than a cool trick if you want to play around. It's not very useful in this day and age.
Con Extremely heavy and impactful on resources
A massive amount of resources are used as graphical processing in cool-retro-term. They are ridiculously heavy for the terminal's intended use.
Con Large dependency on kde
It looks like many of the effects present here are provided by more or less stock kde effect libraries. For Gnome-based systems, installing this will pull in a large handful of kde libs.
